"KNOBEL, Ark. -- They are the talk of Clay County, crop circles in a local field of wheat. But don't go calling Agents Mulder and Scully on the phone and turn this one into an X-file just yet."
After a morning getting my head around Div X (just about - Marianne will be pleased, now we can play .avi movies and all that at last*), I'm back in the weird and wonderful. The reporter at Kait8 asks us not to think things bizarre, but swiftly adds:"There are some that maintain that there are aliens that are trying to communicate with us by the use of ancient Sumerian symbols."
If there's no messing in the replies to the poll on that page, then the "some" are in a small majority already, but maybe only half a dozen people voted.
Crop circles in Arkansas are as nothing, however, to the way in which British astronomer royal Martin Rees (here on 'Edge') has calculated that "the odds of an apocalyptic disaster striking Earth have risen to about 50 percent from 20 percent a hundred years ago," according to a story at -- yuk! -- CNN. Not that Professor Rees says when this might happen, though he last month published a book cheerily called 'Our Final Century' (Amazon UK).
I found both these delightful items on my way to the 'Fortean Times', a copious chronicle of "strange phenomena" to be added forthwith to bookmarks of the bizarre.
If that weren't enough, the FT (not to be confused with the pink one) gleefully surveys a miscellany of oddities, some less tongue-in-cheek than others. These include the British 'Lobster: Journal of parapolitics, intelligence and State Research'. Its Summer 2003 issue, scarcely surprisingly, would appear to contain much about Iraq and other recent hot issues for lies and spin.
Other reviews have ranged from a favourable one of Alan Moore's story collection 'Voice of the Fire' to a nasty dousing of something else fiery by Carlos Castaneda (who maintains a website after being dismissed by the FT as "laughing all the way to the bank"). And almost at random, I'd mention 'Psychoactive Sacramentals' (hmm... entheogens, anyone?), along with 'Popular Paranoia' (Amazon US) and 'The Complete History of Jack the Ripper' by Philip Sugden (FT itself).
zzz
Incidentally, anybody who assumes that I've begun spending evenings delving into curious corners of cyberspace to keep my mind off the prospect of having probes pushed deep into my own innards in less than a week would be, of course, perfectly correct...
So let me also introduce you, possibly, to 'The Anomalist, which yesterday noted with the help of 'The Guardian' that the impending apocalypse is a hot topic in America, but today goes to Australia and 'The Age', wherein Rachel Berger considers that 'Monday the 16th could be your lucky day'.
Rachel notes that she
"can't help falling in love with people who are too good for me and disappear every time I leave the room because I was a cruel princess during the Middle Ages and now it's payback time. Problem is, every time I read my horoscope or cast my runes or I Ching, I get a different message."
But she's primarily concerned with the number 13, not 16, before informing us that "Monday 16th is associated with flogging dead horses". This is an activity I try to persuade people, including myself, to renounce, but why Rachel should think Monday 16th is the day for it, I haven't got the foggiest idea.
'The Anomalist', meanwhile, not only keeps a daily journal of "unexplained mysteries, maverick science" and suchlike, but has since 1996 handed out annual awards to books "that help to shed light on topics that science and history tend to ignore..."
I'm only a week late in writing about the not-pink FT, since my sudden whim for the weird led me to learn that it won one of this year's 31 Webby Awards announced on June 5.
The other winners who drew my attention were mainly in the "music" and "net art" categories. Most of the remainder were places already familiar to many people who browse too far and wide.
It would appear -- unless we are all already deceased but simply unaware of the fact (a possibility which does sometimes occur to me after an overdose of theoretical physics, sci-fi, or eastern mysticism) -- that the month of June arrived as normal despite the dire predictions made by one "weird Webby" nominee.
As Jeremy Rogers explains in an May 23 editorial at his gloriously extraordinary place:
"After two years of preparing psychologically and logistically for the pole shift, I must finally concede it is unlikely to occur in the immediate future. I was almost 90% convinced up until late March of this year. Late March/early April was perceived as the verification time when Planet X would be visible as a reddish cross in the sky to the whole world, seven weeks prior to the expected pole shift. This was the time when the public following the Planet X issue would require little persuasion to convince them it was for real.
Instead, when the long awaited period arrived, there were only personal anecdotal accounts of a red object in the night sky. The sketchy nature of these accounts, offered nearly in all cases by individuals aware of or biased towards the subject, arose doubts about their veracity.
I held out despite this key prediction failure to avoid a potential scenario of being caught off guard. Planet X may have been stealthier in its infiltration of the solar system and overall visibility then we imagined."
Planet X?? You'd better believe it, baby! Oh, and that's where I found the astronomer royal ... and the crop circles.
 Around March 20, Jeremy had been sure, "the Earth's rotation will slow to an eventual halt at least seven days prior to the day of the pole shift, which is now definitively scheduled for the 27th May 2003. The Atlantic Ocean is expected to be on the sunny side, facing Planet X and the Sun. Thus the eastern portion of North and South America and western part of Europe, for example, should remain in constant daylight or dusk depending on location. The rest of the world, mainly the continent of Asia, will be in total darkness."
Well, 'Core' blimey! It's all straight out of the movies, almost...
Pole Shift Preparation proved purposeless, Jeremy seems none too perturbed, keeps a human-looking head on his shoulders and reports going about quite ordinary activities when he's not updating us on the latest most horrible "earth events".
He got his Planet X ideas, it seems, at ZetaTalk. While I don't speak Zetan myself, these friendly aliens may help unravel any number of our human myths for us (by way of a busy woman called Nancy).
If you've got no idea what Planet X (alias Niburu) is, well -- just click on Niburu (where the picture came from)!
zzz
Silly me, really.
I was convinced that some nasty things happening now had far more to do with global warming and insane humanoid behaviour than anything I learned tonight.
But since Jeremy explains that the 'New Scientist' gave Planet X a spread, I searched their site.
Inexplicably, I drew a blank, but discovered some reassuring things on the way; for instance, on Christmas Day 2001, we were reminded that:
"The cranberries Britons eat with their Christmas dinners were probably flown to the UK from Los Angeles, clocking up 9000 kilometres and spewing out carbon dioxide all the way. The carrots could come from South Africa and the potatoes from Italy, all of them contributing to the planet's burden of greenhouse gases." (article)
The following March:
"A huge raft of ice has cleaved off the Antarctic peninsula and smashed into thousands of icebergs. The collapse was predicted by scientists but they are stunned by the size and speed of the event." (article)
And "huge" meant 500 billion tonnes of ice sheet. By last August, the planet was getting "fatter round the middle":
"The prime suspect is changes in ocean circulation, which geophysicists plan to investigate." (article)
All in all, "2002 in the environment" was just wonderful. We did enjoy the
"warmest first quarter for a millennium, said UK researchers. The year ended as the second warmest on record." (article)
You know, when I read the same publication's "hot topic" site on global warming, I don't find it at all weird that a few places I've seen tonight would have me believe that half of America either thinks people have already been abducted by aliens or sincerely hope this will happen in the very near future.
I wonder what they make of that at Exxon, ChevronTexaco and company...
Back in the real world, I was wondering who had won those Sturgeon awards I mentioned yesterday, only to find I'd made a mistake. Got the month wrong. Like the pole shift people.
Perhaps it's time I began learning Zetan. How do they say "egg on your face"?
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*Successfully installing Div X proved more complicated than I was led to believe for Mac people nowadays, and I have no desire to write about those perambulations.
But I will mention some good places to go:
• VideoLAN, here in Paris (this site in English) as one "Open Source video streaming solution for every OS [operating system]";
• on "3IVX MPEG-4" video compression technology" (note their forums too);
• there's DiVA at the same place; and
• at DivX.com, I'd hoped to find almost all the answers, but didn't. However, they have excellent and lively forums, where I filched much help.
11:31:43 PM link 
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